Tag: Liberal

Posted in Portuguese

As Legislativas

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Referring back to the video I shared a few days ago…

No ano passado, prestei muita atenção às notícias sobre as autárquicas mas, desta vez, a eleição passou me quase despercebida no meu sofá*. Estava desperto** para os acontecimentos, claro, mas só de modo ténue. Ouvi uns podcasts, vi uns tuites. Hoje, há um vídeo na Internet – provavelmente já viste – no qual um jornalista fala das legislativas e finge pedir uma explicação sobre o leque de partidos que fizeram parte.

É óbvio que os termos políticos, como “Liberal” e “socialista” têm significados (ou seja valores?) diferentes em países diferentes, e isso é bem ilustrado pelo contraste entre Portugal e os EUA.

* One of the problems of trying to reproduce my own writing style in Portuguese is that its not always easy to distinguish jokes or deliberately odd expressions from actual mistakes. I am really trying to say “It went almost unnoticed on my sofa” but of course that sounds weird in English so in Portuguese, I had suggestions like “passou quase despercebido enquanto estava no meu sofá” which is probably a more normal way of expressing it.

** I originally wrote that I was conscious (“consciente”) of the goings-on but that seems not to be the way Portuguese speakers use that word. Instead they are awake to it.

Posted in English

Liberals

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I’ve been watching the reaction to this American child who ended up killing two people due to living in a place with terrible gun laws and worse ideas. Needless to say, most Brazilians think he’s a hero. Or most vocal twitter Brazilians think so anyway. The Portuguese tend to line up closer to the brits, utterly baffled and bewildered by the whole business and fairly sure something has gone wrong somewhere.

What’s interesting to me, from the political point of view, is how the word Liberal is used in Portugal. Of course, the word has a slightly different valence from country to country. Over here, liberals are well-meaning but ineffective. In the US the term is used as a derogatory label for anyone on the spectrum between Hillary Clinton and Lenin. But check out this tweet from Diogo Faro, the Owen Jones of Portuguese Twitter.

And that’s one of hundreds and hundreds I could have picked. Liberals and fascists seem often to be equated as if they were basically the same thing. I’m not sure exactly where this comes from: whether the Iniciativa Liberal are genuinely very right wing, or if its just a phenomenon of the parties being so fragmented that the IL end up in alliances with parties like Chega in the same way as the centre left has to shack up with the communists. Or maybe Portuguese political twitter is a minority that’s so far to the left that the remaining 99% of the political spectrum just seems like fascism from where they’re standing. I dunno.

Anyway, sorry for the politics. Ill get back to other things next.